Digital Filing Systems and me
I’ve worked in administration for a big multi-site University and I’ve also worked for a much smaller educational institution. One thing they both had in common was the need to easily save, share and retrieve documents of all kinds. For me, a digital filing system is the obvious solution.
When I first arrived at the smaller institution, I immediately saw a need for my department to move away from paper-based systems and join the ‘digital revolution’ (it’s the 21st Century after all!).
If you’re still filing hard copy papers, here’s how to get a digital filing system in place and make it work for everyone who needs access to those documents.
1. Choose a digital filing system
You may need to do some research here to find the best fit for your business, whether this be a shared drive area on your local server or a cloud-based option such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox.
2. Main Folders
Think about how you will group areas of your business by over-arching headings which are logical to you and to others. For example, in an educational institution we used top level folders for each academic year period.
3. Sub Folders
Similar to the main folders, you need to give sub-folders a clear title that makes sense to you when you go looking for it. Then within that sub-folder you can have further folders that really drill down a bit more. For example, we needed a shared area for academic staff to save their draft exam documents, so I created a folder for each member of staff and within those further folders for each group of assessments required.
4. File naming conventions
This is actually a really important one and for an organisation with several staff members, you all need to agree on how you’re going to name your files.
If you’re going to use dates in filenames it can be handy to have that at the beginning and in reverse format (year, month, day), this way the group of files will come up in date order (see example below).
Using underscores to separate descriptors also makes it more legible.
These days users having the ability to work on the same ‘live’ document should make it easier to see the latest version. If staff are still saving their own version to work on offline though, dates and version numbers are even more important.
Below is an example of what can happen if staff do their own thing, any idea which is the most up to date version?
Me neither, thanks Sandra!
5. Now the hard part, stick with it!
Actually, it’s not hard at all, you’ve got a digital filing system in place, just keep using it the right way.
Remember to have an archive folder too and systematically move across the really old documents that you don’t need to have immediately to hand.
As a Virtual Assistant I work on either a regular or Ad Hoc basis with clients.
If you need flexible help with document management or setting up systems please do get in touch.
